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Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.

Toni Morrison

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Toni Morrison
Age: 88 †
Born: 1931
Born: February 18
Died: 2019
Died: August 5
Audiobook Narrator
Librettist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Lorain
Ohio
Chloe Ardelia Wofford
Chloe Anthony Wofford-Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford
Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison
Force
Ineffable
Language
Felicity
War
Pins
Able
Genocide
Never
Arrogance
Slavery
Reach
Toward
Yearn

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If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.
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Being able to laugh got me through.
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There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.
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My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.
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You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?
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There is really nothing more to say - except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
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In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.
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Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.
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You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.
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Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.
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Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?
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I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.
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they ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four locked trees which promised cooling they flung themselves into the shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly
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Maybe [I care about language] because I'm an editor, maybe because I'm picky, but it's all we got, don't shrink it. Don't dumb it out, make it little.
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What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.
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Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.
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An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
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